Hold Me In the In-Between
by laBoyzLoveChicken
Summary: AU, 1947. Tori, unable to cope with the deaths of her parents and sister, becomes the newest patient at the mental asylum where Cat lives. But she brings with her an intriguing ticket that promises to bring the bearer the chance to win their heart's desire at Crescent Hill Manor. They are both forced into a game that will lead to self-revelations and, if they lose, self-destruction
1. The Ticket

**A/N: **Hi, everyone! This isn't my first time at the fanfiction rodeo, but I haven't written anything for years. So I decided to turn over a new leaf, get a new account and a new fandom, and write this story because I can't get it out of my head. There will be Cade, and maybe some Tandre, so, yeah, make sure you at least like those ships. Also rating will probably go up in later chapters, etc., etc. But you aren't even reading this anyway, so why am I still typing?

Tori is the first friend Cat has at the asylum. Tori is nice and Tori is safe and Tori's not even _crazy_, just depressed and broken and confused. When she talks about the accident that brought her here, she doesn't sound sad, she sounds normal. Cat is pretty sure that this is why she's in an asylum to begin with, because people who are alright cry and scream about their feelings, which Tori can't seem to do. But Tori will learn how to do this, Cat knows, because the doctors always talk to her like she has a future on the outside of the white walls, the brick. They don't talk to Cat that way, and they don't talk to anyone else like that, either. There's a difference between trauma and crazy, is what they think, and they think Cat's crazy. Cat's _not_ crazy, for the record, she's just a little out there. Nothing about her is uncontrollable or dangerous, not like her brother – her mother described her at the intake session as a carton of milk that's one day past its expiration date, that's alright to drink but it's not quite what you want or expect. Cat knows that she's not even here because her parents think she's lost her mind, since they don't think that. They know what it's like to see that happen to someone. When Cat's brother came back from Germany he stopped being her brother and started being someone else. He took his gun outside and woke the whole neighborhood up with his target practice before even the fishermen had gotten up for work. He never smiled at Cat, or anyone else, and liked to listen radio plays based on H.P. Lovecraft's stories. He told Cat he loved her, and every time he said it he made it sound like this would be the last time. So one time their parents forced him into saying it the last time and they took him away – or, really, they let other people take him away. He didn't protest much, he just kept saying that they had better have the radio wherever he was going, they had better have the radio. Cat's only here because her parents didn't know what else to do after Colin left (always _left_, never _taken_, and never, ever _gone_), and catching her in her room with another girl's hand between her legs was a good enough way to dispose of her as well. Cat thinks that her parents probably pretend that they didn't have any kids at all, ever, like their lives have turned out alright. Maybe they've taken down all the pictures in the house of Colin and Cat, cleared out their rooms for the space they've always wanted – a drafting room for father the architect, a crafts room for mother the community organizer. They were always better with other people's kids than their own.

But Tori. Cat thinks Tori's family was probably pretty normal before they died, or else Tori wouldn't miss them so much. She sits in their room at night and sings the notes of a song over and over again. She says that there are words, but that she's forgotten them. Cat knows this a lie, yet it doesn't bother her. People are always lying, in here, especially to her.

"What are you going to do when you get out?" Tori asks one evening. There's pink light coming in through their window, the bars surrounding it making funny shadows on the hard floor. Cat thinks it's silly that they have hard floors when they're so careful about everything else – it wouldn't be hard, if you were determined enough, to bash your head on it so hard that you'd stop thinking at all.

"I'm not going to get out," Cat says.

Tori frowns. "Why not?"

"Because I'm not the kind of person you can cure."  
This gets her to pause for a moment, looking down at her hands. Cat knows she's searching, searching for a loophole. "Well, what was it that got you here in the first place? What happened to you?"

"Nothing happened to me. I was just born wrong, that's all." Cat shrugs. She lies down on her bed and curls up as tightly as she can. "You had a bad thing happen to you, and you have to get better. I never had anything bad happen to me, so I can't get better."

Tori stares and stares and keeps staring, long after Cat has stopped watching her. "What do they think is wrong with you?"

"They think I'm too stupid and too weird," Cat says. She leaves out what really brought her here – Tori's normal, and something like this might bother her. "Maybe you can help me be how they want me to be."

"Yeah, OK, I'll try." It's all the same tone, everything Tori says, the whole time.

Tori first mentions the train on one of their afternoons outside. Cat likes these, because she likes flowers and sunlight and plucking berries straight off the vine to eat. She has to be careful about this last one, because the nurses and the orderlies don't like when that happens. Together they're sitting on a bench, each working on something. The orderlies let Cat knit, because she's proven that she won't stab herself to death with one of the plastic needles. Tori looks over the scraps of family photographs she keeps tucked in the pages of a notebook filled with big, loopy handwriting. Cat knows that Tori writes in small, precise letters, so she figures the notebook belonged to Trina, Tori's sister.

"Have you ever heard of the Crescent Express?" Tori asks.

"No. What is it?" Cat has been knitting socks for the past three months – not one pair, but many pairs. She likes making them for the other patients.

Tori fidgets, shuffling through the photos. "I'm not really sure. It's a train. It goes to somewhere called Crescent Hill Manor."

"I've never heard of that either."

"Oh." Tori goes back her pictures, back to beaches and Christmases and sing-alongs by a fire. Cat thinks her family might have been like that, once, but she doesn't remember it much.

The ticket is on Tori's bedside table while she's in the shower. It's another day, after they've been gardening. Whenever they're allowed to garden Cat lets herself stay dirty, ruins her sheets. The nurses say fine, if she doesn't mind sleeping on muddy sheets until the next washing. Cat tells them she doesn't, and until they do laundry again she will wake up with dark smudges on her face and her forearms and her legs.

It's almost like Tori wants her to find it, so obvious there on top of what Cat is now certain is Trina's diary. The ticket is normal-sized, stapled to sheets of paper, but it's a deep red, almost like blood but if blood were pleasant to look at, with white lettering stamped onto it. The paper is the regular off-white Cat's accustomed to seeing, seeing doctor's do their dirty work on and tacked up to the bulletin board listing names of people who missed phone calls from home.

"Crescent Express: Admit One," it reads. Under the destination header, the words "Crescent Hill Manor" are printed. The date is in three days – "Friday, October 2, 1947, 10:24 PM." The departure field is left blank. Cat thinks this is stupid – how is anyone supposed to know where to get on the train? Maybe that's why there's so much paper, there was a problem and they couldn't get the information on the ticket itself.

Cat picks up the paper, peels back the ticket so she can read what's printed. The first page is a letter, an invitation of sorts. It's advertising a party at Crescent Hill Manor, promising a party "like nothing you've ever seen." There will be contests, it says, and prizes for the winners. Prizes "like nothing you could ever imagine." Cat laughs at this, because the doctors are always telling her that she has an active imagination, and she's sure that there's none of those prizes that she couldn't guess. She can't even think of a prize that she wants, right now. Prizes come with prices, that much Cat knows.

The next page is a list of instructions on how to get on the train. It's a short list. All it tells you to go to a train station, alone – the ticket will only work for one person, and one person only. Wave the ticket in the wind. The train will come. The ticket is good for one ride and one ride only, but there will always be tickets at the manor for those who ask.

"Where did it come from?" Cat has the ticket sitting on her lap, the paper sagging between her thighs in her criss-cross applesauce position.

Tori doesn't even need to look at Cat to figure out what she's talking about. "I found it by the road. After the accident." Steady voice, even her small fingers don't tremble as she folds them on her lap. "I showed it to the police, but they thought it meant nothing. They didn't even want to take it to the station with them. So I kept it. You saw the date?" Cat nods. "It's stupid, anyway. It's not real."

"My brother went to a train station by himself once," Cat says. "He sat on the bench in a lion suit for three hours and roared at people."

Emotion flounders across Tori's face, just for a little bit, and one Cat can't even identify, but it's there. "Well, it's not real. I'm not going."

"OK." To Cat this is the end of the discussion. She puts the ticket on her bedside table and rolls onto her side, closes her eyes. Sometimes she sucks her thumb to make herself feel better, but she's been doing it less and less with Tori around.

"I mean, we couldn't even sneak out..."  
"Yes, you can," Cat tells her. "The girl who was here before you was really smart and she figured out how to get the bars off the window."

"We're on the second floor."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

There it was again, something flowing across Tori's face barely long enough for Cat to register it. "Nothing. Just that, well, we can't jump from the second floor."

"Oh." Cat smooths out the edges of her blanket and picks at them with her nails. "The girl before you used to tie together our blankets and go down. I was always cold, but she yelled at me, so I had to hide under the bed."

Tori hesitates, hitches her breath a couple of times before she can let words follow. "Would you come with me, if I went?"

"I thought you didn't believe in it."

"Didn't you read the letter?" Tori settles into her own bed now, and their conversation pauses for a moment as the stony steps of the orderly pass by. A click, and Tori and Cat are locked in for the night.

When Cat speaks again, it's a whisper. "Yes."

"And you don't care about it at all?" Tori is on her back – Tori always sleeps on her back. The doctors tell Cat that women sleep on their backs, only children and deviants sleep on their stomachs or their sides. Cat thinks it's funny that they think she's both of those things, an innocent child and a sinful deviant. They can't decide.

"I don't want any prizes."

"You don't even know what they are."  
"I know I don't want them!" Cat raises her voice, just a little. She's never been good at being forceful; it always turns whiny and she usually starts to cry if she has to keep it up for too long.

Tori lets them both stew in the silence, waits until she hears Cat's breathing return to normal. "OK, OK. Maybe I do." Her voice cracks on the last word.

"For your parents. And your sister."

"They left." _Left,_ like Colin, not taken and not gone. "I want them back."

"Aren't they dead?" Cat scrunches up her nose in the dark, trying to remember all she knows of Tori's story. A lonesome bridge in the middle of the night, a rainy night. A car that hit a puddle too fast at the wrong angle, spun out and smashed into the side of the bridge. Flipped over it, landed on the sand, thank god. In the water, and there would be no survivors instead of one. Cat thinks that Tori mentioned in a group session once that they were heading back late from her grandparents' house because her father had an important business meeting the next morning. "Tori? They're dead, right?"

"They left."

Cat is spread-eagle on the floor of the common room during free time. She makes _chugga-chugga-chugga _train noises with her wet lips and watches Marge's ankles twitching in front of her. Marge is alright most days, only sometimes she thinks there are people who come to her room at night and put their hands over her mouth so she can't scream. Then they leave. During free time she stands in the corner with a phone cord wriggled around her wrist, muttering to her daughter, or she does what she's doing now, sitting on the couch as Bethany teaches her how to cross-stitch. Bethany is only 24, just six years older than Cat, and everyone calls her Nurse Bethany except Cat, who she lets call her just regular "Bethany." Sometimes Cat dreams about her, the naughty dreams that make her blush if she thinks about them too long. She wishes she didn't have these dreams, then she would be OK. If Cat looks at the floor all day and fills her head with thoughts of boys' chests and hands, she doesn't mind so much. It's the dreams that remind her of what she's missing.

Soon enough Tori comes over from the phone, though she won't say who she's been talking to. Cat thinks it's probably her grandparents or an aunt or an uncle or something; friends almost never bother calling. "Was it your boyfriend?"

"No." Tori sits on the squishy blue couch, on the opposite side from Bethany and Marge. She curls her legs up underneath her body so that Cat can't see her at all.

"No because you don't have one, or no because you were talking to somebody else?" Cat keeps spouting out train noises, whistling when she thinks Tori's taken too long coming up with a lie to answer her question.

But it's not a lie, not a whole lie. "I don't think I have one anymore."

"What's his name?"

"Jasper."  
Cat giggles, the wheezing kind she gets when she's been rolling around in dust. "That's a funny name."  
"I liked him."

"Are you going to go on the train?"

"I don't have anything to lose." There's the hesitation again, and Cat is struck by the thought that Tori would probably look gorgeous if she ever would smile. "Will you come with me?"

"I can't. The ticket said it was only good for one person." Cat whistles, rolls over, giggles again. Now that she's looking up she can see Tori peering at her. She has her glasses on, and she suddenly looks older. Cat wiggles uncomfortably and shuts her eyes. "How did you get a ticket?"

"I told you: I found it after the accident."  
"Maybe I'll find one."

And find one Cat does, the next day. It's been warm for October, so they're gardening again. Bethany supervises them, standing off to the side by the more troubled patients who aren't allowed the small trowels that Cat and Tori are holding, who do nothing but hold the flowers in their hands and try not to let them fall.

Tori talks but Cat doesn't listen, because Cat can never listen when there's dirt and plants and freshness and life surrounding her. It buzzes in her mind and nothing can overcome it, not Bethany and not her parents and not even Colin. Even Tori's chattering in the air next to her ear can't get through the haze, and she doesn't mind, neither of them do. The dirt seeps between Cat's fingers and flows from her back into the earth, into the hole she's been digging. She doesn't mind if she gets a flower in the ground or not; she just wants the brown smears across her body, it makes her feel alive, less insane. Not that Cat thinks she's _insane_, of course, no, she doesn't think that. It's just that she doesn't really fit in anywhere else, and she sort of fits here in the hospital, so maybe she has to be a little crazy. But in the dirt, she is small and young and free again; children fit anywhere they choose, small enough to stuff themselves into the slivers and cracks of the world, where they belong. And then they grow up and they get too big for the spaces they're supposed to wedge themselves into, and they have to pick somewhere that isn't quite right.

"Trina used to do this thing where instead of just celebrating her birthday, she'd make us celebrate it for the whole week," Tori is saying. "We'd give her a present every day. I think my parents did that so they could ignore her for the rest of the year. She writes about it in her diary sometimes. She was always so sure of herself, and I thought maybe she was really lonely." Tori pauses, like she might have chuckled if she'd been in the mood. "But she was the same Trina in her diary as she was in real life."

It's in Cat's hand before she realizes what she's holding. At first she doesn't notice, keeps playing with the dirt, and then she feels something that won't slip through, won't go back down. She lifts it, sifts it, pulls it up. Tori has stopped talking. It's two pages, stapled to a ticket the color of blood if blood were pleasant to look at.


	2. The Walk

**A/N: Hi, um, sorry I took so long to update. My power was out for like a week thanks to Sandra Dee, then school started happening again and it was all a mess. Anyway. Now you have a new chapter. Please review if you like it, and if you don't like it, stay away. JK. Constructive criticism is always welcome.**

After Cat finds her ticket there is no question between the girls that they are going. If this had been before her parents and Trina, Tori would have so many questions about this, she would be trembling, she might not even go. Of course Tori's not thinking properly now and it's all she wants, this fantasy of this manor. Cat has started to wonder if she's gone truly psychotic, lost everything like Colin lost everything, like Tori is a fantasy she just made up and these train tickets are part of it. That would explain hers just sort of appearing in the ground. She asks one of the doctors, her primary doctor Dr. Ryan, if he can see Tori, too. Dr. Ryan just stares at her and tells her that Tori is very much real. Cat believes him, because she's pretty sure that they don't encourage people to have imaginary friends. Colin had a couple of imaginary friends, long past the time that he was supposed to. They went away when he sailed through high school, and then they flickered back in and out once he came back from France. Cat thought it was fun, when they were little, because Colin's older and most older brothers don't like to play pretend with their little sisters. She felt lucky; she never thought there was anything wrong with him, not until after the war.

Tori has started mumbling to herself, which Cat hardly notices because almost everyone she knows mumbles to themselves. She does it, too, sometimes, but usually she sings instead of talks. Her mother liked – well, Cat supposes she probably still likes it – old jazz music from the '20s and her father always sang cowboy songs, and Cat likes those, but her favorite is _Show Boat. _Tori doesn't sing when she mumbles, which Cat thinks is a shame because she likes Tori's voice when she hums the old lullaby at night after she believes Cat's fallen asleep, after she believes Cat can't hear her. Tori wouldn't sing _Show Boat_, because you can't dance to it. Cat guesses that Tori would like swing, but she doesn't know, because they don't ask each other about that kind of thing. But the doctors, the doctors – they've noticed Tori's mumblings and grumblings, so quiet no one knows the words. It makes them giddy, they think she's finally starting to accept the reality of her situation, to process it. Cat knows better, because of their secret. That's how she knows she and Tori are friends, because they have a secret together. She and Colin had a lot of secrets, none of which Cat remembers anymore. This bothers her some nights, and she'll stay up late, scribbling on the wall with charcoal until something comes out. In the morning the orderlies shake their heads, wash off the words, steal Cat's charcoal, shove her into more therapy sessions with Dr. Ryan and his head in his hands. Then in about a month they think she'll be alright this time, give her charcoal and a warning, and wait for her to write again.

"Are you ready?" They aren't give coats, not in their rooms, so Tori has put on all three of her white outfits. It looks funny against her skin and her hair, but Cat can't say why she thinks this. She doesn't know.

Cold has never been a problem for Cat, so she only has on her regular gown. But three pairs of socks, because her toes get chilled and then they feel like they might fall off, and Cat doesn't want to lose her toes. Colin knew people in the war who lost their toes in the snow. "Yes."

"You'll be cold."

"I know." Cat flings their tied-together bed sheets out the window and into the back yard. There's a fence around the asylum, but Cat's old roommate taught her where she'd cut a small hole into it, one covered by the bushes and branches that lived under the barbed wire. When Colin saw a concentration camp in France, he said there was barbed wire around that fence, too, a fence so long that your fogged-up breath clouded the end of it. He would draw it on paper sometimes after dinner, loops and loops and loops that looked more like a telephone cord than a line of barbed wire to Cat.

They've already gotten the bars of the window with a screwdriver that Cat's old roommate had gotten from one of the orderlies she was fucking. The bars came off easy, attached to the windowsill with a couple of hinges. Cat put the screwdriver back in its hidey-hole, a secret compartment in Tori's dresser between the final drawer and the bottom of the furniture. Cat's old roommate had fucked one of the orderlies into making that for her.

Tori knots the end of the sheets around her bed post, leans out the window. "It doesn't go all the way to the ground."

"We don't need it to." Cat sticks her head next to Tori's and points to a marble ledge on the window below them. Next to the ledge is a long black drain pipe with perfect stepping stones, rings around the circumference where it's been bolted together. Tori shivers as she realizes what they're about to do.

Cat slips out first, shimmies down the sheets and onto the ledge. She leans over to the pipe, and for a moment her stomach catches like she's about to fall, but her tiny fingers grip the pipe enough for her to swing her legs over. Holding steady she walks her down, down, down. The metal is slippery under her hands, and chilly. Cat wonders about Colin's stories, about how she never thought to ask if people lost fingers in the snow, too, or if they lost them from something else, something worse. She knows people must have lost fingers – it was a war, and that's what a war means: people lose things. Even the winners, they lose something on the way. Cat presses her body flush against the pipe, angry protests from the goose-bump surface of her skin, but she keeps going. Above her the pipe begins to shake from Tori's weight now pressing on it, and Cat almost panics, her whole body feels like it's in pieces and she can only control one bit at a time, and that won't be enough because she's slipping away, slipping away, and Colin's not there and it's not pretend –

"Cat!" Tori hisses. But – no, not a hiss, Tori's same old voice in the same old tone, just a little louder. "Why did you stop?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to." Cat takes shallow breaths and turns them into deep exhales, her legs shaking as she forces herself to go on. At least there's no wind tonight.

When her feet finally hit the ground, Cat runs over to the fence and picks her way to through the rose bushes next to the daisies, pokes around at the bottom of the metal until she finds a piece she can lift. Without hesitation she wriggles her tiny frame through the gap and falls out on the other side on her knees.

Tori joins her much more gracefully a few moments later, side-stepping a still supine Cat to breath on the ground outside, the free ground. "Cat," Tori says, "you're bleeding."

Cat looks down at her arms, which are indeed zig-zagged with tiny cuts and scrapes and even one long scratch that goes from just after her wrist to just before the inside of her elbow. But she's not bleeding, they're the kind of cuts that squeeze out one or two drops of blood and then shirk away, or the kind that go red around the edges and just look like they might bleed if you push on them too hard. "I guess I got them from the roses." Cat gets herself up off the ground and looks over at Tori, Tori who is already walking ahead of her, Tori who got through the roses with no cuts and no scars.

"We won't have to go back," Tori says as though this has just occurred to her. "No matter what happens at the manor, we still don't have to go back. We're already out."

Cat has been thinking of this during the whole walk into Elroy as she shuffles behind Tori. They haven't been singing, like Colin used to whenever he and Cat would walk in the farms around their hometown. Well, Colin whistled, because he couldn't sing but he could whistle better than anyone Cat has ever known. "What would we do if we got out?"

"We could get jobs. It doesn't have to be in Elroy, we could go wherever we want, as long as it's not back there."

"I might want to go back."

"Why?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Cat thinks of Bethany and the garden and Marge and Dr. Ryan. She thinks of the hard floors and her knitting and the pills that swim down her throat every morning. For the first time she notices that Tori has a small bag – or, really, a handkerchief tied at the top and weighed down with something square. No matter what, Tori was never going to go back. Cat thinks this is stupid, because she's only been their a little while, not long enough to know if she might like it.

Tori doesn't respond to Cat's question and simply continues down the road. One car has driven by during the time they've been walking, no more than that. Elroy's not a very rich town, and it's also small, so most people don't bother with having a car at all, especially when there's a train that goes to Buckworth, where they have a steel factory that most of the men in Elroy work at. One of the men at the asylum, Terry, used to work there until one day he just started to pick up the pieces of steel, heave them on his shoulder, and aim them at people while he made gun noises. Cat likes Terry, and she knitted him three pairs of socks, because he's the only man in the asylum who has been to France. But they're not friends.

Elroy is an hour walk from the asylum, though the tiny lights can be seen when there's still twenty minutes left of the walk to go. It's orange, which is something Cat has always found funny about lamps in the darkness. Like it's always Halloween at night, if you're at the right place. Elroy is orange and hazy with one big spot of white, probably for the only gas station in town, which Cat remembers because her mother stopped to fill the car up there before they continued to the asylum. As far as she can recall Elroy has a sweets shop, a big restaurant with a few rooms to let, a post office, a bank, and a feed store. There might be other things there, but Cat could only focus on so much as they moved through the town. She's sure there must be a church or two tucked away behind the shutters of the houses, a graveyard keeping watch over Elroy's dead. She missed those, on the way in.

"What do you think the mansion will be like?" Tori asks. "Have you ever been to one?"

"Once," Cat says. "My brother danced naked in front of one and we had to go pick him up. Then the mansion people invited us inside so they could yell at us."

"It won't be like that," Tori says. "I bet it will be nice. We lived in a good house, but it wasn't a mansion."

Cat thinks about how friends are people who share secrets, and who is a person who has many secrets that they don't share? Is there a number of secrets you have to share to have it mean something, to be more of a friend than a loner. Cat doesn't know. She doesn't think she has any secrets, but those are the worst kind. Colin didn't think he had any, but he had many that they just couldn't stop spilling once they got started. They spilled all out of him and ruined the carpets and the couches.

"We're here," Tori says, but she doesn't stop walking, because they're not quite there, not yet. They've hit the outskirts of Elroy. On their right is the white light of the gas station sign, a convenience store behind the array of pumps with a man's face settled in its window. Tori catches his eye and immediately looks down, while Cat just keeps on staring. They're too far away to make out any of his facial features. He doesn't seem too bothered, too angry, too upset with them for walking down the middle of the street so late at night, and dressed like they are. Cat shivers.

Between the two of them Tori seems to keep up the chatter. She's never been to a town like this before, isolated in her big house in her big suburb. Tori only knew her next-door neighbors, Cat knew everybody, even the people she wasn't supposed to know and the people she wished she didn't. The chatter barely registers to Cat, the way Tori talks like she's never believed in towns like this before. Like they existed as little pit-stops for weary travelers to pick up some gas, some food, some rest. Like she didn't realize the people who pumped the gas and served the food and watched over the resting slugged home at the end of the night to live what little of their lives belonged to themselves. Cat imagines her father back at his candy store in Collingswood, slipping an extra lollipop into the bags of his tiniest customers, her mother doing a stealthy sweep of the aisles. She imagines what they would do if the world worked like Tori thought, if they would just freeze at closing and shake awake an hour before opening. That might have been better, Cat thinks, for her and Colin – it might have saved, well, it might have saved her. It wasn't their parents that broke Colin.

Cat looks around for the church she knows has to be in Elroy, because they're in Nebraska and there are churches everywhere in Nebraska. When she lived with her parents they went to church every Sunday, and Cat loved being able to wear her prettiest dresses, ones that had to gather dust until church and holidays, because Cat was too wild, too dirty to wear them to school. They wouldn't be pretty if she wore them too often, her mother said. Sometimes Cat had to leave church early, because she couldn't sit still and the pastor wouldn't let her walk around while he talked. She never understood this; she still _listened_ to him, and couldn't he see that she heard him better when she was moving? Besides, wasn't being idle something the devil liked? If Cat was walking around she could walk just a little, just a little faster, and he'd never be able to catch her. Idle hands, the older she got the more idle they were, because they wouldn't let her run around anymore, it's why she's the way she is. They looked at her body and they said that it was time for her to grow up.

"I haven't been to church since the accident," Tori says, pointing. Behind the tailor's store on their left is the tippy-top of a steeple, just a bit of a cone and a cross bearing down over the main street of Elroy.

"I used to like it," Cat says. "But I went once in the asylum and it was different."

Tori nods and puts her hand on Cat's arm. This motion stops Cat in her tracks. Tori's hand is warm and soft and small, and it's been a long time since Cat's been touched without "Come on, Cat, we need to go _this_ way," or "If you just settle down, Cat, it won't hurt so much." Colin's last hug; her mother didn't touch her when they said goodbye, except to squeeze her shoulder. Cat had little red marks there from her mother's long nails for a few days afterward.

And they stay there like that, two sets of eyes on a hand on an arm. Cat clears her throat twice. "Tori...what are you – "

"I don't know, I just..." Tori shakes her head and takes her hand off. "Let's keep going."

They make a right turn off the main road into a little residential street, it could be Cat's own. There's even a toy truck in one of the yards exactly like the one Colin used to have, more paint chipped and one wheel missing, but it's so much like Colin's. When the next-door neighbors' cat had kittens, Colin and Cat put them in the back of the dump truck and drove them amongst the weeds.

"Look," Tori whispers, nudging Cat. At the end of the block is the ruins of the train station. Columns stand up like they once supported a roof that's no longer there, bits and pieces of it scattered across the deck. Trees stand opposite the station, Elroy's tiny oasis of civilization dissolving into the unknowns of Nebraska wilderness, the railway tracks serving as a barrier. The whole thing is not nearly as intimidating as Cat expected it to be – in fact, it's sort of peaceful, like the train station has served its purpose and is now in a nice retirement. No more feet treading on its back and no more weight held up by its bones, just its skeleton left to look at the forest. Cat thinks this doesn't sound like a bad way to end her own days.

Their own footsteps are soft on the wood. Tori clutches her handkerchief bag closer to her chest. Cat pulls her ticket from her pocket and runs her fingers over and over and over it. She waits for Tori to dig hers out of her bag and together they step to the edge of the platform, their tickets waving in the sudden wind.


End file.
